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Mastering the use of Instagram in your social media marketing can take time. We can’t all be like Beyonce and simply gain millions of Instagram likes by posting photos with our children however we can follow these five steps to make sure our posts pack a punch.
1. Don’t use the camera on your phone
Even if you have the best phone on the market, the quality of photos still won’t compare to those of a camera. If you are lucky enough to have access to a DSLR or mirrorless camera, use it for Instagram. Take your high quality photos on the camera, even edit them if you have software such as Adobe Lightroom, and then send it to your phone. Once it reaches your phone, you only have 24 hours if you want to load to your story. Click the icon that you normally would to take a photo in Instagram and then swipe down to reveal all photos from your phone’s library from the past 24 hours. The same goes for videos too. There is no time limit to loading photos from your library as regular posts.
2. Location, location, location
Did you know that when you tag your location in a story, Instagram automatically adds your clip to the story of that location? For instance if you location tagged being in Stanley Park, that clip would be added to the Instagram-made story for Vancouver. Anybody in the Vancouver area can watch that story which means your clip is getting seen by hundreds or thousands of extra people. If you have any branded merchandise, keep it in shot when location tagging a clip for that extra brand awareness push.
3. #useall30
If you don’t use any hashtags, your post will only be seen by your followers. When it comes to using Instagram as a marketing tool, you want your post to be seen by as many people as possible. Instagram allows you to use 30 hashtags per post. We recommend you use them all. Invest some time into finding which hashtags (that are appropriate to your brand or content) get used the most. Hit the search icon to search for hashtags. For instance if you type #travelling you will see it has been tagged 25.2 million times however #traveling (the US spelling) has been tagged 32.9 millions times. Keep a handy list of your core hashtags to use on each post, as time goes on you can adjust them to test which work best for you. To avoid clogging up your caption with hashtags, adding the hashtags as a comment on your photo has the same effect. If you wanted, in the future, you could even delete the comment to tidy up the look of your post.
4. Don’t stick to one filter
Don’t feel obliged to use Instagram’s filters just because they are there. You have many options. As mentioned in tip 1, you could edit your photos with your favourite software before sending them to your phone. There are numerous apps you can download to your phone to edit the photos there instead. Within Instagram, you can skip past the filters and instead tap “Edit” where you can make adjustments such as Saturation and Shadows. Your final option, if you have become attached to Instagram’s filters, is to adjust the filter. Tap once to select your favourite filter and then tap again to adjust the strength of the filter.
5. No comment
Commenting on Instagram is vital. We don’t just mean in reply to those interacting with your posts but also on other people’s posts. If you spend a solid block of time, going through Instagram and writing comments on posts by potential customers or accounts with a similar audience to yourself, you will see your number of followers drastically increase. If you want to get more followers on Instagram, doing this for just 30 minutes, twice a week, will give you the results you want.
Put some of these tips into practice and let us know how they affect you? If you are wanting to learn more on how to use social media to grow your business, our Vancouver based marketing agency would love to hear from you. We are ready to help with all of your social media marketing needs.
Put some of these tips into practice and let us know how they affect you? If you are wanting to learn more on how to use social media to grow your business, our Vancouver based marketing agency would love to hear from you. We are ready to help with all of your social media marketing needs.